FreeNAS is managed through a comprehensive web interface that is supplemented by a minimalistic shell console that handles essential administrative functions. The web interface supports storage array configuration, user management, sharing configuration and system maintenance.

As an embedded system appliance, system boots from a 2GB image that typically resides on a USB Flash device or SATADOM. This image can be configured using a bootable CD-ROM installer or by flashing the image directly using a utility like ‘dd‘. The operating system is fully independent of its storage arrays, allowing its configuration database and encryption keys to be backed up and restored to a fresh installation of the OS. This separation also allows for system upgrades to be performed though the web interface.

Notes

FreeNAS needs to be installed on a USB drive separate from the disks (or a small drive) since FreeNAS can not utilize the drive on which it’s installed for storage.

You can manage the configuration using the web interface

Forget about WiFi ( for now )

Installation

1. The very first step is to download the FreeNAS ISO image and burn it to a blank CD-R/CD-RW. You can get the file here.

2. Place the USB stick into a USB port that’s attached directly to your system board. 3. Power up your machine and head directly to your BIOS config. Boot Order: CD/DVD drive, USB HDD, disable all other devices 4. You’ll see some text scrolling like:

After Booting You will be welcomed by :

5. All the options are self explanatory. Choose Option 1 or just wait for the timer to finish and boot into default installer <

All three of these have their advantages and trade-offs. For simplicity’s sake, we’re going to show you how to set up a CIFS share. This is because Windows, OS X and your favorite GNU/Linux distro all offer support for this protocol out of the box.

1. First, we have to set up our disk volumes.”Storage,” -> “Volumes” -> “Create Volume.” Before you check any disks, give the volume a name and click “ZFS.” This will show the ZFS Extra section. Notice iyou can select None, Log, Cache or Spare for each disk listed. You would use these options if you wished to host your ZFS Log data or cache on a separate drive, like an SSD, to increase performance. The spare option would allow the drive to operate as a backup in the event one of the other drives failed. For the purpose of this guide, we’ll leave them all set to “None.” 2. Check all of the disks in the “Member disks” section.

Notice the “Group Type” there? FreeNAS is asking us what type of volume we want. Since we only have three disks, our available options are: ZFS Mirror, ZFS Stripe or RAID-Z.

A ZFS mirrored volume would create a volume of the three drives above limited to the space of the smallest drive. So, we’d get a 71.4GB volume that had a one-to-one copy on our 250GB drive and 160GB drive. In case one of the drives died, we’d still have a backup copy on the other. This would be a poor choice with the combination of drives we’re using, since we’d lose so much available storage. Also not a wise choice with the availability of RAID-Z.

A striped volume creates a volume which has an available size of all disks combined. So in this case we’d get 442.5GB of storage available, with no redundancy. Not the best setup for redundancy, because if a drive fails, your volume goes offline and you’ll have possible data loss. Always remember: it’s never a question of if a hard drive will fail, but when. This is, however, the best setup for providing the maximum amount of storage space.

A RAID-Z1 Volume, in the most basic of terms, is an advanced mirror.

In our case, we’ll go with ZFS Stripe. If you have a better disk setup than us — say, three 1TB drives — you’ll want to choose RAID-Z or ZFS Stripe with two drives and configure the third drive as a spare in the ZFS Extra settings.

FINISHING UP

At last, we click “Add volume” and the volume is created. Next, change the permissions on that volume so that anyone can read and write to it.

1. On the left, under Storage > Volumes, you should now see it listed as /mnt/myvolname, where “myvolname” is the name you gave to your newly minted volume. In our case, it’s /mnt/data. Expand that menu and click “Change Permissions.”

Now it’s time to share that volume and get on with the exciting business of saving your data. The very first thing we need to do is enable the services required to share our files. Since we’re using CIFS specifically, we want to enable the service required for that particular protocol. So, click on the “Services” button with the gears icon at the top of the page, and you should see this:

Hit the “OFF” button to enable CIFS. Here, you can also enable any other protocol you’d like, such as SSH, NFS, AFP, et cetera. The slider should be flipped to “ON” when you’re done. Next, click the wrench icon to bring up the CIFS service options. We want to check the “Allow guest access” checkbox and click OK.

Give your CIFS share a name, and select the path to the volume you just created. In our case /mnt/data not /mnt/vol1. Basically prepend “/mnt/” to the name you gave your volume. Make sure to check “Browsable to Network Clients,” “Allow Guest Access.” Scroll down and click “OK.”

Now you can enjoy your Network Storage storage. Start copying over your music, pictures and movies. And hey, now you can enable UPnP in FreeNAS and pickup a media player that supports DLNA. There’s really so much you can do with a home NAS. Exploring is half the fun.

TnX && Credit: 0xFFFF

Positives

- Free - Flexibility - Ease of Management

Negatives

You will need to know some basic technical information about your home network

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I heartily recommend FreeNAS if you are looking for a free (or very inexpensive) solution for a file server. FreeNAS offers a very positive story, with flexibility, ease of management, good performance - and a price that can't be beat.